Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine talks about the state's new facial recognition system, which has 26,585 users. / Glenn Hartong / The Enquirer

Written by

Chrissie Thompson and Jessie Balmert

Of the more than 26,500 people with access to Ohio’s facial recognition system:

• About 1,030 work in the federal government, from offices both inside and outside Ohio. They include one user from the U.S. Department of Education’s Chicago branch, one from the Defense Department’s finance arm and one who works in security in the State Department’s Missouri office.

• Around 2,100 work in Southwest Ohio. That includes dozens of courts and police, from Morrow to Lebanon to Terrace Park to Seven Mile.

• Another 150 work for other cities or states near Ohio – in most cases, with more access to Ohio’s technology than they have to their own state’s facial recognition system. Michigan doesn’t even have facial recognition technology, but a handful of Michigan officers can run a search in Ohio.

Meanwhile, more than 26,500 users from law enforcement agencies and courts still had access to the facial recognition system – more users, with fewer restrictions on their searches, than facial recognition software run by any other state. DeWine appointed an advisory group to review the law enforcement database, which includes the new technology, but did not cut off access to facial recognition.

That group’s recommendations are expected to be released Friday, but deliberations last week indicate the group doesn’t intend to ask for many immediate changes to the system. Instead, members think DeWine should form another, permanent committee to make more detailed recommendations. DeWine’s office has already started making changes based on worries from committee members, but those could take a year to complete – or even longer.

Searched by park rangers investigating car break-in

More than 1,600 police departments, courts and other agencies have access to facial recognition technology inside the Ohio Law Enforcement Gateway (OHLEG). That amounts to 26,585 people who can use facial recognition to run a snapshot through all of Ohio’s driver’s license, state ID and criminal intake photos to try to identify a person. They have access to such searches from virtually any computer or mobile device in the U.S. with access to the Internet.

The top federal user is the FBI, with 211 employees who can use facial recognition across several offices. The Internal Revenue Service has 67 users, all in Ohio. The CIA and the National Security Agency don’t have employees with access, according to the roster obtained by The Enquirer.

Of the more than 350 people who work for cities or states outside Ohio, the Pennsylvania State Police tops the list of employees with access to facial recognition, with 66. Next are Northern Kentucky police departments in Covington, Newport, Florence and Campbell County.

Pennsylvania and Kentucky allow some law enforcement officers access to their facial recognition systems directly. But Kentucky’s system only has 34 users, while at least 200 users of Ohio’s system work in Northern Kentucky alone.

In West Virginia and Indiana, some police have direct access to Ohio’s facial recognition software. In their own states, however, they must ask license bureau officials to run a search for them.

Within Ohio, Cincinnati Police has the fourth-highest number of users, with 314.

The Hamilton County Park District has 11 users, all park rangers – essentially, the park police. Sgt. Sheli McDonough is the main investigator in the department, so she’s the only person who is likely to do a facial recognition search. Most of the time, her search would be monitored, said Chief Tom Doyle, as other officers gather around to help with a particularly difficult case.

McDonough recently ran a facial recognition search to try to identify a suspect in a smash-and-grab car break-in. But the surveillance-video image was too grainy for the software to come back with a hit.

In Delhi Township, 22 officers can perform facial recognition searches, but no one has used the technology so far, said Lt. Joe Macaluso. In the past, the Delhi police have worked with the Hamilton County sheriff’s office to use its older, smaller mug-shot facial recognition program, he said.

Letting smaller departments do the searches themselves in OHLEG will encourage more officers to use the technology to fight crime, he said.

Plus, letting smaller agencies use the software keeps them from having to assume a “Mother, may I?” attitude toward larger police departments, said Lt. Scott Gaviglia of the Union Township Police Department. Still, none of the department’s 47 users have run a facial recognition search so far, relying on other search elements such as name, address or car description.

“We’ll use it if other methods fail. It’s still an emerging science,” Gaviglia said.

DeWine: Permanent group will monitor use of OHLEG

In its deliberations, the advisory board has been in agreement: Law enforcement officers, no matter how small their department, should keep access to facial recognition. But the board has favored cutting off court employees’ access.

That would be fine with Becky Rosenbalm, clerk in the Monroe Mayor’s Court. She is the only person in the court with access to OHLEG, which she mostly uses to find a person’s most recent address or license plate number when she’s completing warrant paperwork for a police officer or sending a notice to someone who has defaulted on a payment plan.

The only reason she’d need facial recognition, she says, is to help identify a person who had given an incorrect name in an arrest.

“If there was a need for it, I’m sure the police department could handle it,” Rosenbalm said. “I wouldn’t be opposed to them saying the court couldn’t use it.”

The board settled on most of its recommendations at its meeting last week. Members would like the attorney general’s office to carry out its plan of separating facial recognition from the standard OHLEG search engine so that its access can be restricted – likely excluding court employees, for instance. And members want to see random audits, likely performed by police chiefs who could look over recent OHLEG or facial recognition searches.

To give more specific oversight and recommendations, the group plans to ask DeWine to create a permanent advisory committee. DeWine said he plans to appoint members to the committee within three weeks.

“Instead of being nobody there to monitor, they think we should have an independent group to monitor OHLEG, and I agree,” DeWine said. “It will give people more confidence that there isn’t abuse going on.”

But I thought you said...

But I thought you said...

Some of you are remembering other stories from The Enquirer’s investigation into Ohio’s facial recognition system, and you may be wondering why we’re using different numbers today.

Specifically, The Enquirer and Gannett Ohio last month said Ohio’s new facial recognition system had 30,000 users, thousands upon thousands more than in any other state. That’s a figure we repeatedly used in interviews with officials from the attorney general’s office, without correction from them.

When The Enquirer asked for a list of the facial recognition users, though, things got a little confusing. The state was finishing an annual update of its user roster and said it would provide more clarity when it was done.

After a few weeks, the attorney general’s office was able to provide the list we sought. Turns out the previous number we had cited was out-of-date and a little inaccurate. As of early October, OHLEG had 27,040 users, and 26,585 of those have access to facial recognition.

Even with the new numbers, the access to facial recognition in Ohio is still unprecedented around the country.

What else will change -- and is it enough?

• More training on how to use OHLEG and facial recognition, as well as rules for its use, in an effort to prevent abuse.

• Random audits, likely performed by police chiefs who could look over recent OHLEG or facial recognition searches.

• Eventually, perhaps in a year or longer, a system that would allow police chiefs and court leaders to select which OHLEG databases or apps an employee should be able to access, further streamlining the system’s use. The attorney general’s office is working on this.

David Pepper, the Cincinnatian who plans to challenge DeWine’s 2014 re-election campaign, approves of the audits and restrictions the group is recommending. But he had advocated for limiting facial recognition access to several dozen people taking around-the-clock search requests from law enforcement officers, as in most other states.

“That builds in an automatic check and balance that will basically get rid of the risk of abuse,” Pepper said. “I would say, ‘Let’s just start over.’ ”

DeWine’s office has already started fixing the “most obvious and glaring problems,” said Gary Daniels, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. “That said, time will tell how positive this ends up being.”